Plextor Plexwriter 16/10/40A Review - PAGE 1

Plextor has always stood as one of the best names in CD Burning technology, always pushing to try and beat their competitors to reach new speeds and features. The PX-W1610TA is part of the newest breed of CD-RW drives. Although it still retains the same rewrite speed as previous generations the PX-W1610TA comes with a 40x read speed and a wicked write speed of 16x supported by the incredible BURN-Proof technology. Watch as we explore the features of this new drive.

The first thing to mention is of course is the drives 16X CD-R write speed, which is incredible. If the drive really was writing at 16X it would have a throughput of 2400 Kb/s, which will probably end up taxing your system heavily. Enter BURN-Proof technology which allows your CD Burner to recover from errors that would otherwise end up taxing your computer and forcing you to avoid touching anything in fear of making a coaster. This also allows the CD Burner to get away with using a tiny 2MB buffer. Also note that this drive does support overburning.

Another good point is the 40x CD Read speed which is finally fast enough to allow you to replace your stand alone CD-ROM drive with this burner alone. The 140ms random access time on this unit seems a bit high. I also like the FashROM in this unit which will allow you to easily download and flash updated firmware from Plextors website when they make revisions.

Comments

I just read the review about the plexwriter 16/10/40a, and I agree with Phil 100% about this drive being great. The only thing that I currently don't like is the lack of software support ( Nero & Fireburner& CloneCD) but the driver is fairly new and that should be out soon. Phil also mentioned that he can not find any 10x cdrw's in Canada. He should go to a local staples because I bought a 3 pack of verbatims about 3 months ago.

I used HP 8200i for about 18 months, made many coasters during these months. Always blamed myself for the system not configured properly, now I know, the Plextor with burn proof is so bloody good that even if my system is not 100% tuned, it still works. I wonder when will I see another coaster coming out of the drive! Maybe never!

Quad: I totally agree; now that I've experienced the new BURN-Proof It's hard to go back. The security you get with this kind of drive makes for way better burning experience, kind of like going from driving a klunky, stalling car to driving a Porshe.

Quad: I totally agree; now that I've experienced the new BURN-Proof It's hard to go back. The security you get with this kind of drive makes for way better burning experience, kind of like going from driving a klunky, stalling car to driving a Porshe.

Maybe Neoseeker could start doing car review...

When it comes to cars my son is the BOSS! At the age of 11 he only has licence to drive it on the computer! (Need for Speed-Porsche Unleashed!)I'll ask him if he is interested in the job of an automobile reviewer.

I had one of these drives in my system for about an hour, had to take it out and return it. I did manage to do 1 cd but the writer wouldnt eject the cd. Had to reboot to release the tray. I checked on the web site and found a new firmware to stop this problem( using a bx chipset+16 speed burning). I flashed the rom successfully and was told to reboot the system where upon all the drive would do was sit and flash the "busy" light at me... I put my "old" 12 speed plextor back in.....

I just bought this wonderful burner, but I got a lot of problems with it. The stupid thing won't burn faster than 8x, even on quality CDs. When I select speed 16x, the drive burns half of the time at 16x, and half of the time it's idle (led lights green)... I tried a lot of software, but always the same problem. When I deactivate burnproof, I get immediately a buffer underrun.

I am having the same problem with my Plextor burner. If you find out anything let me know. I am running a dual P3 800mhz system on a tyan tiger 133 board. Its the via chipset with twoe seagate scsi drives. The burner is the only thing on the IDE channels. I can't burn anything past 8x and that is only half the time or it will lock up.

Well, I actually solved the problem with my plextor. I have the VIA KT133A chipset, and I used the original VIA drivers for win2K. The point is that these drivers SUCK. I installed standard windows drivers for my IDE controller, and now all works perfect

Another result of using standard win2K drivers instead of VIA drivers was that I copy files between harddisks at 30 MB/sec instead of 3 MB/sec which I was used to )

I tried to burn stuff with Nero 5582 on a 90 minute/80 mb cd-rom with my Plexwriter, but it keeps spitting it out... I changed the settings in Nero, I updated drivers etc. but it still doesn't work... does it support these kind of media at all?